Twenty years in, The Infamous Stringdusters aren’t coasting. The Grammy Award-winning quintet’s new album ’20/20′ is out now via Americana Vibes, a twenty-track statement from a band that has spent two decades redefining what bluegrass can be and still isn’t done pushing.
To mark the release, the band has shared the music video for “The Voyageur,” one of twenty tracks on an album that also includes “Working Man Blues,” “Dead Man Walking,” “Up from the Bottom,” “Light at the End of the Day,” and “Dancing on the Moon.” It’s a deep, sprawling record that earns every minute of its runtime.
Banjoist Chris Pandolfi frames the band’s current creative drive with real honesty: “We’ve been around for 20 years, and I feel like we’re putting more into our music, both writing and the live shows, than we ever have.” Bassist Travis Book echoes that: “20 years later, we’re still distilling the best elements of what we all bring to the band.” That kind of self-awareness is rare, and it shows in the music.
The Infamous Stringdusters have always operated at a crossroads, where bluegrass instrumentation and vocal harmony collide with frenzied stage energy and rock and roll attitude. Pandolfi, Book, Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), Andy Hall (dobro), and Andy Falco (guitar) blur the lines between bluegrass, Americana, country, and indie-folk with the ease of a band that has spent twenty years perfecting exactly this.
’20/20′ is the purest distillation of that experimentation yet. Each member brings outside solo work and fresh influences back into the fold, and the results run deep. As Falco puts it simply: “Before we go onstage I like to tell the band ‘remember the joy,’ and we are all still incredibly grateful for the opportunity to make this music with each other.”